On Writing A Memoir

craft essay by Peter Amos

Tonight I bent over a page and considered my life. Like straggling to Sutter’s Mill in 1851, too late for fortune, the pan sloshed full of rocks: nothing left, river tapped.

I spend my days in the words of others but I’d never bothered thinking of life as a story. It was virgin territory, which is strange because I lived it. So, I held the pen, but memory is a stubborn child.

The office is monochrome, but, like a plate of matching food, the effect is illusory. Mustard upholstery makes gray tiles feel yellow the way that rice on my plate is yellow beside corn. The windows are smudged and dusted. The ceiling fan doesn’t chop a breeze. Fluorescent lights hum just above the threshold at which I’d ignore them. The room wipes your mind when you enter, and I sit at the computer, open ad-copy, remove errors and excesses – waking sleep until lunch.

But this morning was different.

I waited for the R train on the edge strip like always, craned into the acrid stillness. Earth and metal settled on me like strata over a fossil. When I was small, I sat in closets, curled into nooks with numerous blankets, tried to fit into drawers, cabinets, and suitcases. I found security in walls. In those moments, I looked inward without restriction: outside evaporated, inside focused. On the trains, I empty my mind. The subway’s warmth and layers press tight, making me small. I winnow thoughts like chopping jargon from bullshit, carefully cleaning my mind one word at a time.

I yawned into a distant triangle of incandescent gold and a train clattered into my vision’s limit. I boarded, found a plastic seat in the corner against the vinyl partition, and began the pleasant work of purging my thoughts.

Yesterday, with the task complete, I was left with an infant poplar bending gently against a breeze in my parents’ front yard. A cat sharpened its claws on the bark. The day before that, only a margherita slice on checked parchment paper at a formica table in South Brooklyn’s brackish steppes. Before that, warm baking pavement on the butt of my jeans and the smell of hot rubber and tar.

But this morning, I cast thought after thought into piles, brushed them aside until nothing remained. I stared blankly across the car: rail thunder a white noise amniotic suspending new thoughts in utero under a blanket of gel.

“What the hell do you want?”

I blinked, wanting precisely nothing from anyone for any reason. The voice burped from under a coarse brown-gray beard with aviator sunglasses. I blinked again and realized I was staring at a man, or through him, with my eyes aimed at his bloated, red-cheeked face. A substantial belly bowed his red elastic suspenders and stretched taught his tie-dye shirt. Khaki shorts sat high on his white thighs and an unlit pipe hung from his lips. He leaned forward.

“You deaf?”

He rested one hand on his knee and reached with the other, snapping his fingers in front of my face. My body succumbed briefly to the lurching train, sucked rightward by shrieking brakes as the aluminum beast skidded into Lex-and-59. The bench grimaced under the man’s weight as he heaved himself up and pounded toward the door. The bird he flipped came so close to my empty skull that I could see his yellow-cake fingernail and cracked, white calluses. He spat on the floor and tripped on the platform’s ledge, landed on grimy concrete with a reverberating splat. The door dinged calmly shut and he bellowed profanities under cavernous ceilings. The train swelled forward and I slid across the plastic seat, a living study in inertia. My life seemed suddenly interesting.

That realization percolated until I stepped into the office’s lazy, dust-laden cool some twenty minutes later. The world grew yellow and my mind blank. But I caught the thought like a fly by the wing as it faded. Blank, then, but for one sentence.

My life seems suddenly interesting.

I sat at my computer under the loping, idle fan blades, stared at the computer, and clung desperately to that notion: my life seems suddenly interesting. If I’d let go even to open a spreadsheet or start picking at copy, it would’ve disappeared forever. So I sat, repeating those five words emphatically: forward, backward, rearranged, in my high school level Spanish, the Pig Latin from elementary.

At lunch, I went to the corner pharmacy to buy a spiral notebook. I printed the words, tore them out, and laid the folded page beside my keyboard so I could remember without reciting. When I got home, I sat at the kitchen table while my afternoon coffee hacked and sneezed into the carafe. My life seemed suddenly interesting and I scoured my memory. The train man chewed the stem of his pipe and hurled obscenities, but what about yesterday? The day before? Years ago? The beginning?

My first memory is of looking out the window of a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass at the stoplight across from the 7-Eleven in timid rain. I don’t know why I’m there, where I’m going, who’s driving. Then there’s preschool: air guitar alongside a record player, but I can’t remember what spun.

The page sat empty.

Others unfurl their lives, but I had only baubles, curiosities, paper dolls snipped at the hands. I sat over the notebook, abruptly unaware of why I’d bought it, with what I’d expected to fill it. There was no memoir in me, no story buried, no moral or caution to sift from mud, turn in my hand, wipe clean with cloth.

I plucked words from black and scratched each onto the paper, but they came to nothing. I kept plucking even as I sat the pen down, cast them high to dissolve or scatter, separated them, let each drift away, until I had only five.

My life seems suddenly interesting.

Suddenly life seems interesting.

Suddenly seems life.

Life seems.

Suddenly.

[ … ]​

About the writer

Peter Amos is a native of rural Virginia. The son of an English teacher and a librarian, he studied music in college and moved to New York City where he lives, works, explores, and writes about it. You can follow his writing on his website: The Imagined Thing.(Instagram: @peter.amos)